{"id":1133,"date":"2013-09-29T21:39:23","date_gmt":"2013-09-30T03:39:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1133"},"modified":"2013-09-29T21:40:17","modified_gmt":"2013-09-30T03:40:17","slug":"agatha-christie-the-boomerang-clue-also-known-as-why-didnt-they-ask-evans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/agatha-christie-the-boomerang-clue-also-known-as-why-didnt-they-ask-evans\/","title":{"rendered":"Agatha Christie: The Boomerang Clue (also known as Why Didn\u2019t They Ask Evans?)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Reviewing several contemporary cozies at the same time led me back to the original \u201ccozy\u201d writer, Agatha herself, whose novels and characters have proved an inspiration for generations of writers to follow.\u00a0 This one, published in 1933, is an especially crisp and clever stand alone, a pleasure to read as well as delivering a memorable story. It opens with young Robert \u201cBobby\u201d Jones coming across a man who has fallen over a cliff \u2013 (or has he?) \u2013\u00a0and he sits with the man while his companion goes for help.\u00a0 He\u2019s with the unknown man as he takes his last breath, and as he utters his final phrase, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t they ask Evans?\u201d\u00a0 Bobby feels he\u2019s done his duty after testifying at the inquest, though he\u2019s unsettled by the sister and brother who turn up to identify the man\u2019s body.\u00a0 They feel \u201coff\u201d to him.<\/p>\n

\"boomerangclue\"<\/a>Complicating matters is Lady Frances \u201cFrankie\u201d Derwent; Bobby is the son of the vicar, and Lady Frances is wealthy and titled; Bobby\u2019s sure there\u2019s no chance for their future as they are on such unequal footing.\u00a0 But they\u2019ve known each other since they were children and there\u2019s a certain level of comfort and understanding between them.<\/p>\n

It was at this point that I started to wonder what make Christie\u2019s novels different from contemporary cozies.\u00a0 One commonality is her use of middle-aged or older characters as her detectives.\u00a0 That\u2019s a decidedly contemporary approach \u2013 many mystery writers of today don\u2019t choose a younger person as their narrator or main character.\u00a0 People who solve mysteries have been around and have some understanding of human beings and some life experience.<\/p>\n

There are some differences, too.\u00a0 Christie was pretty unconcerned with aftermath \u2013 a crime is committed and then the rest of the novel is the unraveling of the puzzle pieces needed to arrive at a solution.\u00a0 If two characters meet romantically, they are often young people, like Bobby and Frankie in this novel, who are just getting together.\u00a0 She\u2019s absolutely brilliant at point of view from the perspective of clues.\u00a0 She can take a seemingly baffling clue like \u201cWhy didn\u2019t they ask Evans?\u201d, which seems meaningless and impossible to understand, and then with a quick flick of the switch, she can turn her clue in another direction so it suddenly makes perfect sense.\u00a0 She also is able to use people in the same way; a character perceived one way, when looked at from a different perspective, is entirely different from your first impression.\u00a0 I guess that\u2019s what people mean when they say Agatha Christie \u201ctricks\u201d you, but in truth, she\u2019s so far ahead of the reader that it\u2019s not a trick, it\u2019s just her way of readjusting the landscape.<\/p>\n

In contemporary cozies, it\u2019s the aftermath that\u2019s important.\u00a0 All of them deal with what people who were close to the victim may have felt, and how they\u2019ve dealt with what\u2019s happening.\u00a0 If someone dreadful is killed off, that\u2019s one thing, but in other cases there are family members to consider.\u00a0 The deaths often affect the detectives as well.\u00a0 In a Christie novel, while death is not taken lightly, it\u2019s viewed as a moral wrong that needs to be set right.\u00a0 There\u2019s not the up close and personal look that today\u2019s writers take.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the matter of romance.\u00a0 Many of today\u2019s cozy writers have characters who form long term relationships that take many books to become permanent.\u00a0 Denise Swanson took fifteen books to get Skye and Wally together; and I\u2019m not sure how many Elaine Viets took to get Helen and Phil together, but it was quite a few.\u00a0 Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot have no such complications; and Tommy and Tuppence are presented as a unit from the beginning.<\/p>\n

Times change, and books change along with them.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure how successful a straight up puzzle mystery would be today \u2013 as readers, we\u2019ve come to enjoy our involvement in the characters\u2019 lives; and we know there are messy consequences to murder.\u00a0 Agatha\u2019s stories are still a breath of crisp fresh air, however \u2013 her intelligent mind behind the scenes is always welcome.\u00a0 Vive la difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewing several contemporary cozies at the same time led me back to the original \u201ccozy\u201d writer, Agatha herself, whose novels and characters have proved an inspiration for generations of writers to follow.\u00a0 This one, published in 1933, is an especially crisp and clever stand alone, a pleasure to read as well as delivering a memorable … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6,22],"class_list":["post-1133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-british","tag-oldies-but-goodies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1133"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1136,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133\/revisions\/1136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}